Cuba Must Fully Restore Political and Economic Freedoms

About the Author

Even before his inauguration, President Barack Obama promised to
improve relations with Cuba. He has since taken steps to let
Cuban-Americans travel freely to the island and send more
remittances. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has authorized
talks with Cuban officials and opened the door for Cuba's possible
return to the Organization of American States.

Yet many in Congress, the academic and business communities want
to go further, faster. They've called on Obama to lift the ban on
travel by all American citizens and end trade restrictions
altogether.

Officials of the administration are wary of yielding to this
pressure. Why? Two reasons. For one, no president, as leader of the
Free World, wants to embrace the Cuba of the Castros without some
tangible proof that the 50-year, anti-American dictatorship is
loosening its repression of the Cuban people.

Obama has made future steps contingent on something positive
occurring in Cuba: release of political prisoners, freedom of
travel or freedom of speech - signs of an opening toward democratic
change.

The Castro regime's human rights record is bad. With 200
prisoners of conscience and regular police surveillance and
repression, the Castro system routinely denies freedom of speech,
association, information and travel.

The very grass-roots foundations of freedom - civil society,
trade unions and individual enterprise - are routinely squashed by
the juggernaut of the Cuban state. The communist regime deadens the
lives of millions of Cubans, leaving them apathetic, isolated and
devoid of hope.

Second, no president would feel comfortable taking steps that
would help fill the coffers of Castro Brothers Inc.

Cuba's regressive government controls 90 percent of all economic
activity. It writes every contract and enforces labor discipline.
It directs the judicial and bureaucratic machinery and doles out
wages and profits as it chooses. The cupola of the communist
regime, not the people or the market, calls every shot and reaps
the lion's share of benefits.

The 1962 embargo has been substantially modified over time. The
U.S. now sells hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food on a
cash-and-carry basis. Remittances from the United States add
hundreds of millions more and are certain to grow. Lifting of
restrictions on telecommunications will allow freer communications,
if the Cubans so desire.

Two million foreign tourists bask annually in Cuba's sun while
the majority of Cubans subsist on less than $20 a month. The United
States doesn't impede Cuba's ability to barter, borrow or trade
with the rest of the world. Venezuela's anti-American president
Hugo Chavez props up the Castro regime with an estimated $2 billion
annually. Nevertheless, Fidel Castro calls U.S. policy "genocidal."
More than a billion dollars in trade and remittances has thus far
bought a goose egg's worth of liberalization and human rights
changes. Would additional billions accomplish anymore without a
profound structural, democratic transition in Cuba? In 2009, the
partial embargo serves two purposes. It's still a leveraging point
for bargained change in U.S.-Cuba relations. Second, it represents
the moral divide between liberty and repression, between
dictatorship and democracy.

Contemporary realists argue that in a world of radically diverse
sovereign states such political distinctions are irrelevant, but
most Americans aren't buying this.

So far, the Cuban leadership has been unresponsive to Obama's
overtures. Cuba continues to insist it's the victim rather than the
aggressor. Only a unilateral removal of all U.S. restrictions will
impress Havana's aged hardliners.

For Fidel Castro, venomous as ever, serious dialogue on human
rights and democracy is tantamount to the U.S. accepting "the whip
and yoke" of slavery. The same old mindset, the familiar
intransigence threatens to stymie hopes for improved relations.

The Cuba embargo is like a wall, starkly demarcating two opposed
ways of thinking. It should have fallen in 1989 or in the 1990s as
the rest of Latin America and much of the world moved to
democracy.

It can still quickly disappear once a dissenter like Dr. Oscar
Elias Biscet walks out of prison, when blogger Yoani Sanchez is
free to write and travel without hindrance, and when a humble
Afro-Cuban cane-cutter like Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez is able
to speak his mind without fear of retribution and imprisonment.

In the end, Cuba's hope for change centers on Havana, not
Washington.

Ray
Walser, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst for Latin America
in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies,
a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for
International Studies at Heritage.